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Music: A medley of all the latest books

Cowboy Junkies, 1960s showbiz, Gainsbourg, The Who, The Fall and Carole King

Tony Clayton-Lea's face
Tony Clayton-Lea
Tue Mar 30 2021 - 06:00

One-hit wonders come and go, remembered and forgotten. One such, Excerpt from a Teenage Opera, co-written by singer Keith West with German pop music producer Mark Wirtz, was huge across Europe in 1967.

West will always be best-known for that song, but as Thinking About Tomorrow: Excerpts from the Life of Keith West by Ian L Clay (Hawksmoor Publishing, £22.99) shows, he deserves to be more than a footnote. As a member of London-based Tomorrow (at the forefront of British psychedelia, along with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine), West was fortunate enough to be in a sequence of right place/right time events – a pioneer of sorts who laid out a path for settlers to walk on.

Clay’s considered book delves into the development of West’s career and his eventual part in Madonna’s Ray of Light album, the success of which enabled him to buy an apartment in the Balearics. The nice-work-if-you-can-get-it clincher? Now in his mid-70s, West still receives royalties for that 1967 one-hit wonder.

Cowboy Junkies

Authorised biographies are usually cut and dried – writer and subject connect, talk and then a year or two later the bouncing baby that is the book arrives. Music writer Dave Bowler and Canadian group The Cowboy Junkies, however, took 15 years to first stretch and then join the various dots. For that reason alone, you can sense Music Is the Drug: The Authorised Biography of The Cowboy Junkies by Dave Bowler (Omnibus Press, £20) isn't going to be your usual biography.

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As such, while the band’s chronology is dutifully outlined, there are clever, impressionistic side roads (described by Bowler as “notes falling slow”, from the band’s song of the same name) that take the reader away from the core topics. Between these intriguing narrative deviations, the band’s history (35 years with a sibling-based line-up that has never changed) and the albums (16 studio and five live), there’s a lot to be said for keeping a low profile while maintaining high quality. Bowler, meanwhile, does their legacy proud with what amounts to a 360-degree representation.

Velvet Mafia

Not so much a conspiracy theory as a clever, factually based hook upon which to hang a book, The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men who Ran the Swinging '60s by Darryl W Bullock (Omnibus Press, £20) is a fascinating read about a coterie of gay men in 1960s London that advanced the notion of promoting pop music by and for teenagers.

From players such as Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood (separately, managers of The Beatles and Cream/Bee Gees), Larry Parnes (promoter) and Joe Meek (record producer) to peripheral people such as Lionel Bart (songwriter), Sir Joseph Lockwood (head of EMI) and David Jacobs (show business lawyer), the author weaves and threads their respective timelines and strategies. Just as importantly, he introduces into the mix an array of other men (and, such is the era, to a far lesser extent women) who helped shape a decade that changed pop culture forever. A meticulously researched and authoritatively written piece of work.

Serge Gainsbourg

It isn’t often that a country’s political leader likens a recently deceased artist as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”, but in spring 1991 that’s exactly how François Mitterrand praised Serge Gainsbourg, who had died at the age of 62. Mitterrand was perhaps unaware that Gainsbourg had once sneered at his own national significance: “I practise a minor art that’s supposed to be for young people.”

Throughout Relax Baby Be Cool: The Artistry & Audacity of Serge Gainsbourg by Jeremy Allen (Jawbone, £14.95) is a mischievous sense that Gainsbourg enjoyed his status for no reason other than it acted as a tunnel leading towards different strains of French culture. Allen captures this dichotomy and other occasionally disturbing transgressions (Gainsbourg "was sweet and sensitive and an alcoholic abuser") via a perceptive album-by-album analysis. The result is more critical acuity than biography that, in its own way, nails the slippery subject hard and fast.

The Who

"Delinquent mischief-makers and radical aesthetes, practising an art that was impudent and violent, yet also tenderly disarming." Nik Cohn's view of The Who is presented in the introduction to A Band with Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk by Peter Stanfield (Reaktion Books, £15.99). Alongside Cohn, the author references other 1960s pop/art critics and commentators (including George Melly and Lawrence Alloway, who first coined the term "pop art") as he charts the rise of the group.

Eloquently framing their success as the only successful 1960s UK pop/rock group that didn’t want to be either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, Stanfield locates The Who (and crucially their peak years, during which they were, he writes “not copyists but innovators”) at a boundary-breaking intersection of pop and art-rock.

The Fall

Another intersectional music act was The Fall, although to describe the Manchester band as an "act" is, perhaps, a betrayal of their particular originality. It is fitting, then, that Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall by Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton (Faber & Faber, £25) is less a biography and much more a fragmented if enlightening overview. The co-editors/curators have gathered a treasure trove of peripheral documents (previously unseen artwork, handwritten notes, typed lyrics, ephemera, and a sequence of essays by the likes of Ian Penman, Adelle Stripe, Michael Bracewell, Paul Wilson, Sian Pattenden) that extend the worldview of what a band such as The Fall presented.

It’s true that not everyone will get the cultural references they transmitted (Paul Wilson’s essay, The Law of Optics, is spot on when he likens Mark E Smith’s stage persona as that of a belligerent MC straight out of a 1960s/1970s northern working men’s club’s evening line-up). But how the pieces are put together here is a treat for The Fall friend and foe alike.

Carole King

For almost 20 years, the 33-and-a-Third series of music books has focused on individual albums by acts well known (Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Abba, Radiohead), cultish (Neutral Milk Hotel, Throbbing Gristle, Wire) and many levels in-between. The range of music and their creators defines “eclectic”, while the writing veers from freewheeling to acutely insightful. In essence, the books are for the music fan who (as Rolling Stone noted) “thinks liner notes just aren’t enough”.

The latest title in the 150-plus series is Carole King's Tapestry by Loren Glass (Bloomsbury Academic, £9.99), and from the introduction onwards – in which Glass outlines his late-1960s/early-1970s counter-cultural upbringing – we are in a world where "Tapestry was in heavy rotation . . . Everyone heard it and sang it and bought it."

As with much of the series, the personal is interwoven with the prevailing moods of the era. Still, Glass succeeds in telling us much more about Tapestry itself, which he views as not only “an enduring symbol of and testimony to the women’s liberation movement with which it historically coincided” but also as an album that “legitimated women as creative subjects and economic agents in the popular music industry, inspiring and empowering innumerable subsequent careers”.